Morgan, I was doing a sponsors day for the car club that I'm in and the track was basically a speedway track with mainly right hand corners with a couple of left handers thrown in, I knew the oil level was a little lower than I normally run it and didn't give it to much more thought, the end result I spun a big end bearing on no.4 journal. I dropped the sump and thought I could just change the big end bearings - a complete waste of time, new bearings got me around the block and that was it.

I pulled the motor out and stripped it down and took the crankshaft to Crankshaft Engineers here in Brisbane, I got the phone call from the repairer saying that the crank was bent and that the big end on the conrod was egg shaped, thankfully the crank wasn't cracked.

The crank was straightened and all journals were reground and the conrod re-sized.

Very impressed with the repair job.

Bart, When I machined this crank a few years ago I made sure I machined everything thing as true as possible with balancing in mind i.e whatever I did to one side of the crank I made sure I did to the other, even to the amount of turns that I screwed in the grub screws for plugging the oil galleries.

When I had it balanced the guy was very impressed with how little amount of metal he had to take of to balance it, basiccally it was just a small amount of linishing of each diagonal corner.

It's not a hard job to do to machine them it's very time comsuming, if you have a spare crank i'd recommend you give it a go.